I was in Vietnam as a 26 year old amidst a culture that values age and worships ancestors; a middle class American evangelical amidst poor ethnic minority Christians; an American citizen amidst Vietnamese patriots; a product of individualism amidst a collectivist society; a religious freedom NGO representative amidst Vietnamese officials accused of violating religious freedom.

Ta Phin commune (similar to a county) in Northwest Vietnam was the place where these identities most obviously collided. There, wealthy and individualistic American evangelicals encountered poor Hmong Christians whose faith was causing deep familial and societal rifts, in a region where Communist officials that had historically mistreated ethnic and religious minorities and considered Christianity a subversive American religion. I will conclude this travel blog by describing my visit to Ta Phin and raising a few of the questions that resulted.

We met with the president of the People’s Council of Ta Phin, a communal administrative body, in a second floor room of the local Party building. Inside the small ochre room, a gold bust Ho Chi Minh was positioned beneath an oval plaque of Marx’s and Lenin’s faces on a faded red drape against the back wall. Two windows with no glass overlooked miles of rice paddy terraces climbing up valley walls toward lumpy, bright-white hilltop clouds.

The president was a slight, soft-spoken man from the Dzao ethnic group, wearing the olive jumpsuit with red shoulder tassels that seemed to be government standard issue. He told us first about the peaceful coexistence of the “3 brothers” – the Hmong, Dzao, and Kinh (Vietnamese) ethnic groups that predominated the region. To prove his point, he gestured toward the terraced hills outside the window, explaining that if we were to visit these local farms, we would see all three ethnic groups working side by side to prepare for the fast-approaching harvest.

Vietnam, he explained, highly values social harmony.

Then he began to explain the new religious phenomena in the region, evangelical Christianity. Radio gospel broadcasts out of the Philippines began to reach the area in the 1980s, and the first conversion to Christianity in Ta Phin occurred in 2003. Since most Christians worship privately in their homes, which are geographically remote, an accurate numerical count is difficult. Still, he estimated 240 total Christians (later, a local pastor would estimate a number many times higher). “Following a religion is a right,” he stated.

But that right is complicated. Christianity brings particular economic and social benefit to families who convert. For example, in Hmong culture (which has been especially receptive to the gospel message), traditional beliefs dictate that families must make regular sacrifices to ensure protection against evil spirits. Such sacrifices create an economic hardship for families in one of the poorest regions of Vietnam. Christianity, conversely, states the Jesus himself was the ultimate blood sacrifice, rendering all others unnecessary. Additionally, the status of women in Hmong culture is quite low. Christianity elevates their status significantly by claiming they are equal to men and possess inherent dignity.

For these reasons, some believe economic and social incentives are driving the large number of conversions among the Hmong. Their unconverted family members and neighbors resent the laziness and spiritual irresponsibility by these new Christians, whose foolish behavior could provoke evil spirits and bring calamity to those around them. The government official explained that much time had been spent arbitrating family and village disputes arising over sacrifices and land use.

As he spoke, I was struck suddenly by how ridiculous my questions to him about church registrations must have sounded. In this remote agrarian society, families and neighbors are dividing, and traditional religious and agricultural practices are rapidly changing. Issuing official pieces of paper to house churches seemed peripheral when the entire social fabric was so quickly unraveling. Still, the official smiled thinly and answered my questions, talking about a new pilot program to register local churches and reiterating the right of people to practice their faith.

After this government meeting, we drove a few kilometers up a steep mountain road to meet one young convert, Chang a Cang, a Hmong pastor who was just 20 years old. He, like most Hmong, was small in stature, the top of his head level with my chin (I am 5’3″). Cang’s home was a tiny shack of mud, wood, and corrugated metal surrounded by steep hills of terraced rice paddies and intersecting streams. As an urban apartment dweller, I was struck by the remoteness of this pastor and his extended family, living among the hills of Northwest Vietnam with no visible neighbors.

In the rear of Cang’s home, about 10 total women, children, and infants intently watched our conversation, half-hidden in the dusty dark shadows cast by the sloping metal roof. They wore traditional dress – black linen layers made iridescent (and waterproof) by vigorous rubbing with beeswax, punctuated by bright red and purple embroidery and by tiny bells and coins. By contrast, most Hmong men I had seen, including Cang, wore Western dress.

Communication was difficult because Cang spoke limited Vietnamese, and what little he spoke was in what our translator called “the Hmong manner of speaking.” What’s more, our conversation was interspersed with Christian jargon – baptism, Holy Spirit, blood of Christ, communion, deliverance – with which our translator was unfamiliar. So we fumbled through about an hour of conversation about beliefs (he felt that Matthew 7:7 was the heart of the gospel); reason for conversion (“I used to be plagued by evil spirits, but then I heard about Jesus”); church registration (Cang had submitted an application and was waiting for response); and the everyday struggles of an uneducated, remote, poor Hmong pastor.

(Much of this meeting has been better documented elsewhere by others with whom I traveled, and I’d encourage you to read the accounts of Mark Galli, Kevin Colon, and Bob Roberts.)

Toward the end of our visit, one pastor asked Cang what he needed. Cang mentioned Bibles and a computer. On the spot, the pastors decided to drive Cang into town and buy him a computer. So Cang rode with us for an hour to Lao Cai Town, where the pastors pooled their money to purchase a computer and printer before sending him back home in a taxi, instantly bringing decades of technological advance to his small mud shack in the valley.

As Cang was riding with his new computer in the back of a taxi, I was laying on the bed of my room in the Communist Party Headquarters in Lao Cai, picking absently at the frayed chenille blanket as my mind ran through countless questions.

Is it better to act out of spontaneous generosity, even if that generosity may later prove to have been ill-planned, unsustainable, or even detrimental to the recipient? Or to not act until we are certain that our generosity will contribute to something well-planned, long-term, and locally sustainable?

Spontaneous acts sometimes seem more “pure” but can also mask tainted motives: soothing our guilt for being so wealthy and comfortable; feeling important and necessary as the bearers of expensive gifts; reporting impressive numbers of “lives changed”; maintaining a healthy distance from the complex difficulties of the recipient’s daily life, opting instead for a fast fix; and so on.

Which type of act (with all its beautiful and ugly motives) more pleases God? Glorifies God? Disappoints God? Resembles God – who sometimes lavishes generosity on undeserving people, and other times withholds material comforts for purposes mysterious and sovereign?

Underlying these questions, and the many more that I have left unwritten, is a basic idea: engaging the world as a 26 year old American Christian is messy business, fraught with emotion, confusion, moral ambiguities, mistakes, stereotypes, cultural blunders, deception, and some very unlovely people.

But this is the world that Jesus chose to embrace, taking on all its ugliness and frailty and destructiveness in his own body before dying on its behalf.

As you may have inferred from the gap between my last post and this one, I have spent the last week still sick from whatever bug I picked up in Vietnam.

I began my travel blogs with a post from the Korean airport about cultural differences. I don’t think anything could have better highlighted such differences than seeking medical help in Vietnam and Korea before returning home to the U.S.

On my last day in Vietnam, the concierge of my hotel in Hanoi directed me to a clinic down the street. When I got there, the door was locked, even though the sign in the window said “open” and I could clearly see someone sitting behind a desk inside. I knocked a few times and was about to give up when the figure inside stirred, then slowly made its way to the door to let me in. The door opened, and I stepped into a shabby but clean room with a desk piled with books, two chairs, and a cabinet stacked with drug samples. The doctor was a small woman wearing a labcoat and slippers embroidered with the logo of the Daewoo hotel (where I happened to be staying). She had clearly been sleeping.

She spoke little English, so we had difficulty communicating. But her eyes lit up when I said the word “stomach,” and she said, “Okay, okay, I help.” She opened a paperback volume on her desk and ran her finger down the page until stopping, reading something, and the slamming the book shut. She then dug through the pile of samples on the cabinet and eventually found two bubble packs of pills. I paid about $4 and left with two perscriptions that I had no idea how to take. I realized as I left that she hadn’t taken my temperature.

Later, in my hotel room, I looked up the names of the perscriptions online. Both packages were in French, so it took quite a while to find information on them in English. In the process, I realized one had already expired. Online searching revealed that both were widely regarded as placebos and could cause fairly severe side effects. I decided not to take them.

I hesitate to draw conclusions based on my experience at a single clinic, but I got the overwhelming impression while there that we were acting out a scene from a bad American medical drama. The props (labcoat, drugs, manuals), characters (doctor, patient), and language (“stomach”) were all present, but were only symbolic as linguistic and cultural barriers prevented a substantive exchange.

In a cab on the way to the airport several hours later, my Vietnamese host suggested that my illness was caused by an internal imbalance between yin and yang; constant travel, unusual sleep schedules, and being away from my husband had disrupted the harmony of my body and caused illness. He made a sharp, chopping motion on my neck and back to restore balance, recounting times he had used this massage to help other visitors to Vietnam suffering a similar affliction. (Most interestingly, he had given the same massage to Emily Morrison, the daughter of Norman Morrison, the Quaker who famously set himself ablaze beneath McNamara’s window at the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war. During Emily’s first visit to Vietnam, she became quite ill at Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, but her symptoms were eased by the same massage I was receiving.)

This massage seemed no less plausible a treatment than expired French placebos, and I gladly submitted to my host’s almost painful chopping at my back and neck. I suppose I was hopeful not only that my queasiness would subside, but that I would also witness some sort of triumph of traditional Vietnamese medical practices over a Vietnamese attempt to mimic American medicine (as I thought I’d seen in the clinic). I confess I’ve become a little skeptical about American medicine lately, particularly its propensity to medicate every conceivable condition – for example, this weekend I saw a commercial for a drug to help “restless leg syndrome.”

However, by the time I landed in Seoul, I was feeling terrible. The Seoul airport has a hospital in its basement, and an airport employee kindly wrote for me in Korean on a scrap of paper, “I want to go to the hospital.” I showed this paper to every official I encountered on my way to the hospital – which, it turns out, required leaving the airport altogether – and it seemed to convince customs, passport control, and airport security that I required no special scrutiny. Once in the hospital, my experience was remarkably similar to that in Vietnam, despite the significantly more sterile environment. Once again, I was given two perscriptions that I could not read and did not know how to take. This time, frightened by the prospect of feeling sick for an entire 13 hour flight, I took both before boarding my plane to the U.S. and hoped for the best.

As much as I wished to understand Vietnamese medical beliefs, I am American, and I was relieved to finally arrive in Atlanta and visit the airport clinic. There, I could communicate in English; the doctor acted predictably aloof and technical; and the treatment, an IV, was thoroughly communicated and matter-of-factly administered. The experience lacked the novelty and personal nature of my taxicab massage in Vietnam, but it was effective and, for all its sterile detachment, comforting.

It is strange enough to step inside another culture’s concept of health and medicine, stranger still to do so without any means to communicate about that concept. So I left Vietnam much the way I entered it: reflecting on cultural assumptions and differences, this time made much more immediate and personal as my physical well-being depended on successfully negotiating those differences.

(If you are at all interested in this topic, please read Ann Fadiman’s wonderful book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, about a family of Lao Hmong refugees seeking medical attention in the U.S.)

Lying in bed all week gave me plenty of time to reflect, and now that I am feeling better (i.e., I can type without feeling nauseated), I have some final thoughts on Vietnam that I hope to type today or tomorrow.

Moment #1: Last week, after a long day of meetings with religious and government leaders in Buon Me Thuot, we bought a bunch of Cokes and snacks and piled into a van for the 4 hour drive to Pleiku. As the sun set, our Vietnamese host began singing Sinatra into the van’s microphone (normally used to guide tour groups). Then Binh sang an unidentifiable rock song. Roger sang Elvis. Nolen sang the Monkeys. Eventually, the Vietnamese and Americans sang one another their national anthems. It doesn’t get any weirder than baptists and communists singing karaoke together in a van driving through the middle of Vietnam.

Moment #2: Last night, we were again in a van, this time riding toward the train station in Lao Cai, where we’d catch the sleeper train back to Hanoi. Outside the train station, local residents had set up an impromptu market to sell food, flashlights, and other necessities to travelers preparing to board the train. Our van was slowly maneuvering its way through the crowds of street merchants, our windows open in the stifling heat. Oddly enough, our van had a TV inside that was showing music videos, sort of. This particular video was, in reality, an episode of Tom & Jerry overdubbed with Afropop. Strangely, the antics of the cat and mouse actually seemed to match the pulsating rhythm of the song. Someone turned the volume up until the van vibrated. So perhaps it does get wierder than baptist-communist karaoke . . . driving through a Vietnamese market in a van thumping to an Afropop-Tom & Jerry music video.

In both of these moments, the American delegates and the Vietnamese laughed uncontrollably together. This too, I think, is the stuff of relational diplomacy.

Last night I rode my first sleeper car – a small compartment with 4 narrow bunks. This created an unavoidable situation considered downright scandalous among evangelicals – a female sleeping in the same room as 3 men. I was told that this would make an excellent, attention-grabbing introduction to any speech I ever gave for the rest of my life. “When I was 26, I slept with 3 men in Northwest Vietnam . . .”

Anyway, the night train was a cool experience. i had my best night’s sleep since I’ve been here, despite the incredible noise, stops, and jerks. When I awoke, I witnessed a pink sunrise over lush terraced mountains, tropical plants, and a dense, pure white fog. This is Lao Cai province, where I’ll be for 2 days. It is spectacularly beautiful.

Today we visited projects of Bob Roberts’ in Ta Van, a village near Sa Pa (the main tourist town here). Then we spent the afternoon riding motorbikes through the mountains to waterfalls and small markets. I finally broke down and bought an embroidered bag (the Hmong of this area sell colorful, highly detailed embroidery) for about $2 from a little girl off the street. I was immediately accosted by an older Hmong woman, who told me in a combination of her language, mine, and exuberant hand signals, that the bag I had just bought was stitched on a machine, whereas hers were hand-sewn. Of course, for the hand-sewn variety, it would cost me many thousand more Vietnamese Dong – nearly $5.

This is an enchanting town and has provided a much-needed day of rest and reflection.

I’ve been writing a lot about cultural assumptions. I haven’t mentioned yet what have been some of the more interesting ones on this trip: those of the evangelical megachurch subculture.

Not all these pastors I’m traveling with are megachurch pastors. But all have been heavily influenced by them – Hybels, Warren, Bob Roberts, Andy Stanley, and others.

So it’s fascinating to learn from them. I was hoping to get some gossip showing the ugly underbelly of megachurch evangelicalism – stuff like, “Oh, everyone knows Rick Warren’s a hopeless micromanager”; or “You didn’t know Hybels’ secretary actually writes his sermons?”; or “That discipleship pastor got fired for leading a naked men’s retreat!”

It’s obvious that I came on this trip with some cynicism about megachurches and evangelical subculture. But then, I knew very little about it. I’m learning.

So what DO megachurch pastors talk about? Sports, books, being cheap, writing, theology, sermons, introversion, good coffee, families, and more than anything else, the pressure to be big and known, to lead a personality-centered church, to be on the cover of CT, to develop something new, catchy, innovative.

But none of these guys care about that. Or if they do, they admit it with a humble and repentant attitude. They laugh at themselves and one another a lot. I even heard one – gasp – cuss. I must say, I have grown to care about and admire each of these men, almost in spite of myself.

I indict myself when I am more willing to extend understanding to people a continent away than my coreligionists in the U.S. When it comes to American evangelicalism, I’ve got a lot of cynicism to get over.

My delegation is a healthy mix of perspectives on religious freedom in Vietnam: optimists, cynics, and those who just want to help the Vietnamese people (and if that requires greater religious freedom, then sure, they’ll work for it).

We have spent the last few days in meetings w/government officials and pastors in Dak Lak and Gia Lai provinces in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, two areas w/ some of the worst history of persecution. But these areas have experienced a significant turnaround since the Prime Minister’s Nov 2004 ordinance (and subsequent decrees and instructions) on religious freedom.

We heard a lot about this turnaround, which is really quite phenomenal (you can read more specifics about it on IGE’s website). Or at least, that’s how an optimist sees it. But cynics see the same evidence of turnaround, yet draw very different conclusions.

Cynics ask, “Why must government officials be present when we meet with pastors? Why doesn’t the government answer my questions directly? What does it say about the beliefs of Protestants when they cooperate with a communist government? Why is progress so slow? Do the pastors understand that obeying the government is secondary to obeying Jesus? Why is the U.S. government considering lifting CPC and granting PNTR when there is still so much progress left to make? What happens to religious freedom when these are no longer leverage points?”

I’ve been wondering for months about those last two questions, which are particularly salient right now. They have led me to a third question: can religious freedom be truly sustainable if it is based on incentives?

Don’t get me wrong; I believe in incentives, in Smith’s invisible hand, in what my boss loves to call “naked self-interest.” I am not so naive to think incentives aren’t absolutely necessary. And I believe the VN govt has to learn how to satisfactorily answer the cynics’ questions in a way the West understands.

But the goal of IGE is “sustainable religious freedom.” To me, what’s sustainable is not church registrations in exchange for bilateral deals – those kinds of exchanges of interest are only a means to sustainability. What’s sustainable is a paradigm shift among government officials such that they believe religious freedom will continue to benefit their country long after WTO accession and PNTR status and CPC removal.

How do we know when this shift has happened? How much evidence is enough evidence? How many letters and testimonies and church registrations and laws? How sincere must we judge Vietnam’s motives to be? Or are these even the metrics of measurement in a society so vastly different from our own – a society that has been at war for all but the last 16 years of its history; that as a result fiercely resists being told what to do; that is group-based and collectivist; that often values social harmony over personal freedom?

I must confess my bias. I am an optimist. I believe that the ordinances, decrees, and special instructions issued in 2004 and 2005 signal a paradigm shift in the Vietnamese government. That shift was strategic, self-interested, and incentive-driven to be sure, but a shift nonetheless. I believe the turnaround I have seen is real; that the increasingly harmonious relationship between the church and government is seen by both as socially valuable; and that progress will continue – slowly, unevenly, but continue nonetheless.

In his book No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu answers critics of South Africa’s post-apartheid policy of granting amnesty to those who confessed abuses committed under apartheid. To do so, he quotes Jesus speaking about himself (quoting the prophet Isaiah): “a flickering flame he will not extinguish.”

Tutu likens these post-apartheid confessions to a flickering flame. The confessions are certainly self-interested and likely insincere. Nonetheless, they signal the confessors’ willingness to participate in the new paradigm of a post-apartheid, reconciled South Africa. In a society that values restorative justice more than punitive justice, this paradigm shift is enough. We need not extinguish the flame for not being bright enough. Instead, optimists like me want to encourage it, fan it, and pray like crazy that it grow stronger.

While riding a bus through Dak Lak province today, someone commented that the jungles surrounding us looked like a scene from Platoon. He was right. I felt a profound sadness in wondering what happened in this jungle 30-40 years ago – napalm; Agent Orange; cruelty; death? The strength of the emotion surprised me.

It seems that our attempts to engage Vietnam are always emotional endeavors. For Chris, IGE’s president, Vietnam is the place his father flew over 300 combat missions, and the place from which he will soon adopt his second child.

For me, quite oppositely, Vietnam is the place of the war in which my father refused to fight. His refusal is the reason he spent about a year in prison, and why my parents’ house has a stack of letters from him to my mother, written from jail, in which his handwriting is bizarrely disfigured. I don’t think they ever look at those letters. My mom sent me this email a couple days ago:

“I must say, my imagination conjures up mixed feelings about you being in Vietnam. So much of my formative years was consumed with very vivid accounts of war, bloodshed, torture, and needless killing in Vietnam – it’s hard to not have those images stir up old fears – the thought of you being there is a bit unsettling. I am trying to listen to the rational side of my brain. I know you’re not going to come back as a lost, defeated soul addicted to drugs facing a future of homelessness and despair (like our friends did). You’ll come back brimming with hope and optimism for our world. You can help change the deeply embedded perceptions of Vietnam that we grew up with (not to mention the wartime propaganda we were subjected to on a daily basis). . . . What happened in Vietnam during our lifetimes touched and changed us all. . . .”

There are more recent emotions as well. In February, IGE hosted a delegation of Vietnamese scholars and pastors to Washington, D.C. The week before they arrived, my grandmother died unexpectedly. Five days later, a close friend also died unexpectedly. As a result, I look back at that period of time – despite its significance for IGE and its Vietnamese partners – with great heaviness.

As for this visit, one of our delegation members, Bob, learned that a founding member of his church had died just days before he departed for Vietnam. Bob doesn’t show it, but I would imagine he is carrying around similar heaviness.

And then just two days ago, our Vietnamese partner called me in my hotel room and told me his father had surgery just 3 days ago and is still in the hospital recovering. Somehow, in all our vetting over the events of the next two weeks, this personal detail never came up.

I suppose this is the stuff of relational diplomacy; beginning to see each other as real people with real emotions and families, not as stereotypes and caricatures of greedy imperialists, overzealous evangelicals, or backward communists. But seeing each other this way requires slightly more honesty than is comfortable about our shared emotions, because the emotions make us real to one another. I suppose there’s risk in that, and as a result we prefer detached, unemotional stereotyping of these fellow human beings.